‘What’s there in the Bible, yaar?’ someone asked.
‘The Book of Job, yaar,’ said Rajiv, casual and lascivious. ‘Job goes to his daughter and sleeps with her. I found it and got turned on.’
‘What shit! Where’s that?’ asked Nirmalya.
The tall Desai loped to a drawer and rummaged and took out an old school copy of the book in which, at an early age, Nirmalya had first encountered that stentorian voice, ordering Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He had never quite forgotten that incorporeal, irrefutable demand.
‘Wait a sec, let me find it,’ said Rajiv, hurriedly turning the fragile pages and poring over the tiny print.
Rajiv, who was now at the Sydenham College of Commerce, knew even less about Indian classical music than Nirmalya had a year ago; he, with his no-nonsense, primate-like, terrestrial concerns, knew nothing about Indian culture. He thought people who went around talking about ‘Indian’ culture oily and pretentious.
In school, again and again, they’d memorised the dates of conquests and kingdoms, Ashoka and Chandragupta, Akbar and Shahjahan; their eyes had rested unseeingly, a hundred times, on faded reproductions of the Red Fort and the Ashoka chakra, emblems that were meant to evolve into fingerprints of their identity, and appeared almost as smudged as fingerprints on the cheap paper of the textbook; they’d read The Merchant of Venice, and had never been sure whether to pity Shylock or detest him; both Edgar Allan Poe and G.K. Chesterton had spoken to them, like voices in a seance, one frenzied and uncontrollable, making the classroom giggle and shudder, the other as sweet and reasonable as he was in life. Khushwant Singh too sometimes materialised on their horizon in a puff of smoke, half mischievous clown, half oriental magician. But the Indian poets of antiquity and thereafter, the court poets of emperors and mendicant singers who walked barefoot through the ancient kingdoms — Kalidasa, Kabir, Chandidas, Jayadeva — they’d barely heard of, let alone read or been taught about. And now Nirmalya found it more and more difficult to communicate to his friends the change that was coming upon him as he opened himself to these ragas, and to the telegraphic declarations in Braj Bhasha of the soul’s longing written by the nameless or pseudonymous composers of khayals, not to speak of the devotional poets — this was a secret education. His emergence from school had landed him, almost accidentally, in the midst of this indescribable period of learning.
At first he told no one among his Breach Candy friends. Then, quietly — and, later, with increasing stubbornness, a near-stupid insistence — Nirmalya began to preach to Rajiv Desai, a steady undertone of grinding dissent in their usual ecstatic declamations about Nashville and the opening chords of ‘Horse With No Name’ that maddened Desai. He feigned boredom, even imbecility; he made strange faces and looked the other way. At first, he’d taken this talk about ragas and ustads and shrutis as a great betrayal on Nirmalya’s part, because Nirmalya, of his friends, had been an erudite supporter of the blues at a time when every object in the universe — not only music, but vegetables, festivities, clothes — was being transmogrified into a condition called ‘disco’. To turn away at this testing time from those magnificent sounds of impecunious Chicago to something that was so formless and god-desiring — it seemed to Rajiv Desai not so much perverse as dishonest.
But sometimes Desai almost gave in; it was as if that secret universe had collided with him, and he had to right himself, shake his head clear, and continue quickly on his way as if nothing had happened. One evening, in a car, Nirmalya sang him two lines from an ancient K.L. Saigal ghazal, his voice sweetly rising above the traffic.
‘What d’you think of that?’ he asked, ingenuous but merciless.
Desai looked the other way, in the direction of a famous chemist’s that was now shut. The tragic mood of the ghazal lingered like an aftertaste in the hot taxi. After a moment, he confessed tersely:
‘It’s funky.’
It seemed to Nirmalya that Rajiv had both opened himself ever so marginally, and then withdrawn immediately, and forever, into the safety of Kemp’s Corner and the familiar cartography of Bombay.
* * *
APURVA SENGUPTA decided, again, to court Laxmi Ratan Shukla. Laxmi Ratan Shukla, head of HMV’s light music wing ten years ago, and still, immovably, its head. A persona non grata who held the keys to fortune; a person no one had heard of — except the people who queued up to meet him, to convince him, to plead with him, to give them a chance. He would look back at them through his bifocal spectacles, speaking very softly; you had to strain to hear.
Mr Sengupta, after the board meetings, after socialising with the Tatas, the Poddars, after the poolside cocktails at the five-star hotels, had to readjust himself to Laxmi Ratan Shukla. He was used to the obduracy of this country; used to meeting, in Delhi, after a hurried, solitary, suited breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, some secretary or undersecretary in the ministry near Janpath, about pushing through a new plan for the company that needed government permission. And you needed government permission for everything, in both your personal and professional life — for opening a bank account; for creating a new wing in your firm; for selling a new product. But with Laxmi Ratan Shukla it was slightly different: he was trying to get him to acknowledge, and reward, his wife’s talent. There were no clear rules here. And, for this reason, he was prepared to wait indefinitely; and he was prepared to treat Laxmi Ratan Shukla as, at once, an equal and a special person indefinitely.
Laxmi Ratan Shukla didn’t know what made him special; he knew, really, that he wasn’t special at all; and the strange importance that had been bestowed on him made him perpetually wary. It was almost nine years since he’d muttered, without making eye contact, a half-promise that he might give the go-ahead for Mallika Sengupta to cut a disc of devotionals. They’d reposed their strained faith in the words as if they were a fleetingly heard but mysterious mantra. Nirmalya remembered seeing him in his childhood, drinking tea, eating luchis, and making small, odd noises in his throat, of either satisfaction or discomfort, in their flat near Kemp’s Corner. No noticeable progress had been made since that vision; in the nine years that followed, Mallika Sengupta’s case had neither moved forward nor backward by an inch.
‘She must improve pronunciation,’ Shukla said. ‘It is not enough to have surili voice. Her pronunciation is still Bengali.’
To be a Bengali and to sing in Hindi was, in the eyes of Shukla, an original sin, a stain that would not come off easily. Apurva Sengupta, who usually did little to accommodate time-wasters, listened to him attentively, as if he were explaining an arcane art. He never disagreed with Shukla; he smiled, nodded at Shukla’s cryptic wisdom. Mallika Sengupta was repelled by Shukla, and would long ago have had nothing to do with him; but Apurva Sengupta said to her with peremptory, affectionate impatience: ‘You can’t achieve anything if you let your emotions get the better of you.’ She allowed her mood of frustration to be defused by this bit of paternal advice and was almost convinced by it. The message was clear: it was by having a level head that Mr Sengupta had got to where he was, and become chief executive. He had survived Dyer; he’d survived many other things, the ups and downs that were part of the legend of his life. But was a level head and patience enough with Shukla?
Mr Sengupta took Shukla to the Taj for dinner, to Tanjore, the speciality Indian restaurant. Shukla, squat, myopic, almost muscular, and his two daughters, Priya and Sudha, in salwar kameezes, slightly taller than him. Neither was particularly beautiful — in fact, they were quite plain — but they had the charm that young women often have: especially flowers that have grown in a stone’s shadow. Shukla was a widower; and, seeing him with his daughters, Nirmalya sensed, for the first time, the void from which he came and which he probably lacked the gift or naturalness to talk about. And yet, the same opaque, bereft-of-ordinary-speech quality that made him so difficult to read to his supplicants, translated, with his daughters, into a strange, impenetrable familiarity, an intimacy that didn’t need verbal communication. An ordinary family, without signs of privilege or even a pretence towards being acquainted with these surroundings, the girls accepting the solicitous stewards as temporary incarnations.